1. Field of the Disclosure
Aspects of the disclosure relate in general to financial services. Aspects include a method and a decision making platform to identify travel by payment account holders, and more particularly, to reduce fraudulent transactions involving payment cards without utilizing account holder transaction data.
2. Description of the Related Art
A payment card is a card that can be used by an account holder and accepted by a merchant to make a payment for a purchase or in payment of some other obligation. Payment cards include credit cards, debit cards, charge cards, and Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cards. Payment cards provide the clients of a financial institution (“account holders”) with the ability to pay for goods and services without the inconvenience of using cash.
The payment industry suffers from problems stemming from cross-border travel by account holders. One problem is that fraud rates in cross-border transactions (in which the account holder is from a different country than a merchant) are much higher than those experienced on domestic transactions. These high fraud rates make it risky for the card issuing financial institution (“issuers”) to approve cross-border transactions. As a result, issuers often attempt to mitigate the risk by declining cross-border transactions at higher rates than domestic transactions. While these higher decline rates may minimize the issuing bank's fraud exposure, it inconveniences the account holder, deprives the merchant of a sale, and deprives the issuer of incremental revenue on the purchase.
Generally, at least one payment card network (“payment network”) currently provides fraud scoring for electronic payment transactions. Fraud scoring refers to an indication, or likelihood, that a payment transaction is fraudulent. In one fraud scoring system, the payment card network provides a number back to the payment card issuer between zero and 1,000, which translates into zero and 100 percent, in tenths of percentage points. To provide fraud scoring capability, various vendors or payment card networks provide and market various different fraud scoring products. A payment card network generally selects one of the vendor products to provide its customers (the card issuers) with one of fraud scoring and credit risk scoring that is accessible, for example, on a payment card network.